You Might As Well Jump: Takishawa Is Dead

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Jim saw this over on the ever-good Indie Games blog and prodded me in its direction. It’s called Takishawa is Dead and is a short, if punishing, indie platformer with a kind of Psychonauts meets 3D Ant Attack feel to it – the latter mainly due to the manually-rotating camera and bits of how the 3D tech look. I turned from it pretty quickly – its very much in the school of platforming that digs falling to your death repeatedly – but it provided a stylish gaming wake up to the day. You can follow its development here, or download its 3Mb file here. Teeny! Teeny! Oh – and video below.
Though it’s a speed run, so don’t watch more than a few seconds to get a taste unless you want to know the solution…

Ugh… Really, indie games have a reputation for being unplayable, embracing the weaknesses of older gaming, while instead being based on the limitations of design and hardware are actually intentional.

Nothankyouverymuch, I went ahead and watched the speed run and saw that it would have taken me hours to gain the same amount of understanding. Not that it was hard per se but that it was obfuscated with a poor scale of how far a jump was possible and what the hell you are meant to be doing (made even worse by the limited draw distance).

Also the ending is straight out of Mondo Medicals and it uses the same font for its cryptic gibberings.

Put me down for unimpressed, bad controls, obtuse design (without any Cactus/Karoshi 2 cleverness), truly terrible camera and it manages to be both dull and infuriating. Which is quite a thing when you think about it.

Why don’t games have proper names anymore? It’s like bands – a few years back it was all ‘The This’ and ‘The That’ (and ‘The The’, ho ho) – now indie games have to have more-cryptic-than-thou names all of sudden. Well I for one am putting my boot through the monitor and sending Kieron Gillen the bill.

Played it for a while until it crashed. Strange that the speed runner jumped over all those pillars at the start of the vid (0:10 – 0:22) when if you rotate the camera 180 from where he had it you can jump straight to the exit.

Seems from watching the vid if I had taken the lower path (2:39) I would have got to the end… damn bugyness!